Part 4

We can form some impression of the immense power of prayer and exorcism when we consider that the influence of the will and the idea expressed in the word co-operate in them with the power of the word itself as a mere form. For the material word, the sound caught by the ear, the formula, as such, exercises a magical effect without one's knowing its meaning. The mass of the people with their ignorance of the official language of the Church and of learning, would be badly off if those "Paternosters" and "Ave Marias," committed to memory without understanding them, should be spiritually ineffectual,--if the Latin mass to which the congregation listens should be wanting in edifying and sanctifying power because it is not comprehended. The formularies of the Church established at different times and for various purposes are for this reason of high importance and must be followed conscientiously. A single proof of their extraordinary power may be instanced here. In the year 1532 the devil brought into the heavens a huge comet, which threatened earth and man with drought and pestilence; but the pope solemnly banished the forbidding omen,--and behold! in a short time it disappeared, having day by day diminished through the power of the papal anathema. What a holy word may avail by virtue of its sound (flatus vocis) alone, is indicated in the legend of the tame starling, which was saved from the claws of the hawk just at the moment its death-agony had forced from it the words it had learned to repeat "Ave Maria."

Upon the power of the word as its foundation, rests the papal custom of consecrating bread, wine, oil, salt, tapers, water, bells, fields, meadows, houses, standards and weapons. "With such abuses, such superstition, and diabolical arts was the priesthood filled during papal ascendency"--thus complains an old Protestant theologian who had an eye to that surplus of magic which the Catholic Church possessed over and above that of the Lutheran, but who was blind to the common welfare--"and therefore such things are in vogue even among common men. What was the chief thing in the mass if not the wonder-working words of blessing, when the priest pronounced the four words or the six syllables 'Hoc est corpus meum' (this is my body) over the bread, breathed upon it, and made the sign of the cross three times over it, pretending that the bread was thereby converted into the flesh of Christ? In the same way he transformed the wine in the chalice into the blood of Christ, though no such power is given to syllables and words. He bound the Holy Ghost in the water, the salt, the oil, the tapers, the spices, the stone, wood or earth, when he consecrated churches, altars, churchyards, when he blessed the meat, the eggs, and the like, and when on Easter Eve he consecrated the fire that it should do no damage (though I, God save me, have found out that our village was utterly consumed four days after such consecration), when he baptized and sanctified bells that their ringing might dispel evil influences, quiet tempests, and the like."

The organization of monasteries is to be regarded as the defensive system of the Church, guarding and protecting the territory it has conquered from the devil. As the Mongolian on his irruption into Europe found innumerable steeps crowned with strongly fortified castles, the very number of which deterred from any attempt at siege, so Satan and his hosts find the Christian world strewn with spiritual strongholds, each of which encloses an arsenal filled with mighty weapons for offensive as well as defensive warfare. Every monastery has its master magician, who sells agni Dei, conception-billets, magic incense, salt and tapers which have been consecrated on Candlemas Day, palms consecrated on Palm Sunday, flowers besprinkled with holy water on Ascension Day, and many other appliances belonging to the great magical apparatus of the Church.

This consecrated enginery being so various and complete, it might have been expected that the people would be content, and seek no further expedients than these constantly at hand. But, alas! a people's magic of infernal origin is abroad, and rampant by the side of the holy magic of the Church; and by it Satan tempts the careless, the curious and the irresolute. Even many priests are tainted with it. The holy Boniface, and many popes and monkish chroniclers after him, bitterly lament that the lower clergy compound love-potions and practice divinatory arts, using even the holy appurtenances of the Church, as the host, to fortify the efficacy of their diabolical charms.

Since the Church tries to reduce all conditions of life to harmony with itself, it naturally follows that it sets its seal also to human jurisprudence. The ordeals which it has found employed by some of the nations it has converted, exactly suit its system. It receives them, consequently, as resting on a right idea, makes them what they were not before, a common practice, and gives detailed rules concerning the chants, prayers, conjurations and masses with which they should be accompanied. When a person under accusation or suspicion is to undergo the ordeal by water, for example, the priest is to lead him to the church, and cause him kneeling to pronounce three formulas in which God is implored for protection. Then follow mass and the holy communion. When the accused receives the wafer the priest says: "Be this flesh of our Lord thy test to-day." Then in solemn procession the throng of witnesses repair to the spot where the test is to take place. The priest conjures the water, expelling the demons common to this element, and commands it to be an obedient instrument of God for revealing innocence or crime. The accused is dressed in clean garments, kisses the cross and the gospel, recites a Paternoster and makes the sign of the cross. Then (in the ordeal by hot water) his hand is held in a boiling cauldron: or he is thrown with his hands pinioned and a rope about his waist, into a river. If he does not then sink, his guilt is proved. The ordeal by fire consists in walking over glowing coals, or carrying red-hot iron, or in being dragged through flames clad in a shirt saturated with wax. By the test of fire the genuineness of relics is also sometimes tested. When in A. D. 1010 some monks who had returned from Jerusalem exhibited the towel with which the disciples had wiped the feet of Christ, some doubts of its genuine character were raised, but were all removed by this test. One of the most common of all ordeals is the duel.

God, invoked by the servants of the Church, keeps his protecting hand over innocence. Every doubt of this truth argues faint-heartedness bordering on atheism. This thought lies at the foundation not only of the different kinds of ordeals, but also of the torture, which, constantly extended and intensified under the auspices of the Church, was a form of trial sparing the judge much labor, and leading to the goal more surely than the collation of testimony, which, besides being irksome, hardly ever brings full assurance. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego felt no pain in the fiery furnace. God gives to innocence upon the rack, if not insensibility to pain, at least strength to endure it. But even the arch-fiend, to a certain extent, can protect his subjects. In the case of heretics and witches it is therefore needful to resort to the intensest torture; to exhaust, so to speak, to the last drop, the springs of pain in human nerves, under the hand of skilled tormentors. If then the instruments of torture are previously conjured and sanctified by the priest, and if he stands at the side of the accused ready to interrupt with constant question the diabolic formulas of alleviation which undoubtedly the sufferer murmurs inwardly, then a candid and reliable confession may reasonably be expected, in spite of all efforts to the contrary by the devil. In the "Witch-hammer" (Malleus Malificarum) the ecclesiastical and magical plan of justice celebrates its triumph. This work, bearing the sanction of the pope, contains full directions for the judge presiding in witch-trials. It is, in fact, a hammer which crushes whatever it falls upon. The judge who carefully follows these directions may be confident that Satan himself can not save any one who is under accusation; only God and his holy angels can rescue him, by direct miracle, from death in the flames.

He who finds a judicial system which appeals constantly to the intercession of God of questionable value, may consider that the history of the Church, the experiences of its saints and servants are a succession of divine miracles. God is not chary of his miracles when recognized, and the servants of the Church are in possession of the apostolic power and mandate to perform them.

Another question is, how are the divine miracles to be distinguished from the infernal? All attempts of the acutest scholastics to establish a rule of definite separation for these two kinds of miracles have failed. They are revealed under identical forms, and even the moral perceptions can detect no difference, since Satan is able to transform himself into an angel of light. Reason must also acknowledge its incapacity even in this respect, and rely on the Holy Ghost ever active in the Church and especially in its head. The power of divine truth and inspiration which was poured out upon the apostles on the day of Pentecost, has been transmitted like a magnetic stream from Peter, the first bishop of Rome, to his successors by the laying on of hands, and is in a certain measure imparted, by the sacrament of ordination, to every member of the clerical hierarchy.

* * * * *

The survey of the magic of the Church which has been presented above, ought perhaps to be completed, not by pursuing the tedious path which lies before us through continued description of ecclesiastical customs and opinion, but by simply formulating the general truth: Every symbol, every external token, to which is attributed an independent power for sanctification and an immediate moral influence, is Magic. May the Protestant reader, for whom we are here writing, examine with this maxim in how far the Reformation, which aims to restore to internal authority--the reason and free-will of the individual--its rights, has succeeded in its task. Luther and Calvin assailed many magical usages, and pruned many branches from the tree of dualism, but still allowed its vigorous trunk to remain unscathed. But a dualistic religious system must, on account of the unreasonable cosmical theory on which it rests, sooner or later attack again the inner authority and make itself the sole and absolute external one. It must of necessity degenerate to a statuary fetichism or fall before a complete unitarian reformation. Our day witnesses the conflict between these opposite ideas. On the one side, the belief in a personal spiritual adversary of mankind, preached to the masses from a thousand pulpits, hangs suspended like a sword of Damocles over the head of civilization; on the other side, philosophy and the science of nature diffuse a rational and unitarian theory of the universe and human existence through a constantly enlarging circle. To him who wishes to take part in this all-important struggle, we would commend these words of the noble Bunsen: "Wherever in religion, or state, or civilization, in art or science, the inner is developed more strenuously, and the spiritual earnestly sought after, be it with more or less transformation of what is existing, there progress is at hand; for from the inner, life comes to the external, from the centre to the circumference. There is also the way which leads to life. There new paths are opened to the soul, and genius lifts its wings with divine assurance. If this is true, the contrary must take place wherever the external life is more and more exalted, where the token supersedes more and more the essence, the symbol and the external work the inner act and conscience, where the superficies is taken for the content, the outer monotony for life's uniformity, and appearances for truth. There a luckless future is in waiting, whatever be the aspect of the present."

III.

THE MAGIC OF THE LEARNED.

We find ourselves in a dismal labyrinth of narrow, winding streets, now and then issuing into some open space before a guild-hall or a church. The objects which meet our gaze in this strange city do not solicit pause or reflection; for we have seen essentially the same type of homes and humanity in many another city which we have wandered through in our search for the stone of wisdom. We therefore continue on our way. The buildings of the university are said to be in the neighborhood, and we turn the corner to the right, and again to the left, until we come upon it. The lecture-hour approaches. Professors draped in stiff mantles and wearing the scholastic cap on their supremely wise foreheads, wend their way to the temples of knowledge at the portals of which flocks of students wait. We recognize their various and familiar types: the new-matriculated look as usual, their cheeks still retaining the glow of early youth, their hearts still humble, perhaps still held captive by the sweet delusion that the walls by which they wait are the propylaea to all the secrets of earth and heaven. Just as readily recognized are the parchment-worms, destined one day to shine as lights in the Church and in the domain of science, whether they now toil themselves pale and melancholic over their catenae, their summae and sententiae, or bear with unfeigned self-satisfaction the precious weight of terms which lifts them so conspicuously above the ignorant mass of mortals. And among the throng of the first named still fresh with youth, and these already dried pedants, we find also the far-famed third class of students, adventurers assembled from all quarters under the protection of university-privileges,--those gentlemen with bearded cheek, and faces swelled by drinking and scarred by combat, with terribly long and broad swords dangling at their side,--the heroes of that never ending Iliad which the apprentices of learning and the guilds enact nightly in the darkness of the lanes, who may yet turn out some day the most pious of conventical priors, the gravest doctors and the very severest burgomasters in Christendom, unless before that time they meet their fate upon the gallows, or on the field of battle, or as scholares vagantes in the ditch or by the roadside.

Shall we enter and listen to some of these lectures which are about to be delivered? Our letter of academic membership will open the doors to us, if we desire. To the left in the vaulted hall the professor of medicine has commenced his lecture. With astonishing subtlety and penetration he discusses the highly important question, before propounded by Petrus de Abano, but not as yet fully solved,--"an caput sit factum propter cerebrum vel oculos" (whether the head was formed for the sake of the brain or the eyes). To the right the professor of theology leads us into one of the dim mysteries of the Church by ventilating the question what Peter would have done with the bread and wine, had he distributed the elements while the body of Christ in unchanged reality was yet hanging on the cross. A little farther on in this mouldy vault we find the workshop of philosophy, where a master in the art of abstract reasoning deduces the distinction between universalia ante rem and universalia in re. In yonder furthest room a jurisconsult expounds a passage in the pandects.--Or perhaps you would rather not choose at all? You smile sadly. Alas! like myself you have good reason for complaining with Faust:--

I have, alas! Philosophy, Med'cine, and Jurisprudence too, And to my cost Theology, With ardent labor studied through. And here I stand, with all my lore, Poor fool, no wiser than before.

and if you add like him,

Hence have I now applied myself to magic,

we shall bring back to our minds the object of our burning desires, the hope which cheers us that finally the veil will be torn from the face of the Isis-image, and that we shall behold the unspeakable face to face, even though her looks burn us to ashes. Let us turn our back upon this tragi-comic seat of learning, where, as everywhere else, hoary-headed fools are teaching young chicken-heads to admire nonsense, and young eagle-souls to despair of knowledge. It is not far hence direct--as direct as the winding lanes permit--to that great magician who has taken up his abode in this city. At the feet of that master let us seat ourselves. We shall there slake our burning thirst with at least a few drops of that knowledge which through by-gone ages has been flowing in a subterranean channel, though from the same sources as the streams of Paradise. And if we are disappointed there,--well, then you, if you so choose, can quench your longing for truth in the whirlpool of pleasure and adventure. I shall go into a monastery, seek the narrowest of its cells, watch, pray, scourge forth my blood in streams; or I shall go to India, sit down upon the ground and stare at the tip of my nose,--stare at it and never cease, year out and year in, until all consciousness is extinguished. Agreed, then, is it not?....

We are arrived in the very loneliest quarter of the town, and the most dreary limits of the quarter, where old crumbling houses group themselves in inextricable confusion along the city wall, and from their gable windows fix their vacant, hypochondriacal looks upon the open fields beyond. A tower, crowning the wall of the fort upon this side, now serves the great scientist as an observatory and dwelling, given him by the burgomaster and the council of the city. He was for a long time private physician to the Queen of France, but has now retired to this lonely place from the pleasures, the distinctions, and the dangers of life at court, in order to devote himself quietly to research and study. He has a protector in the prince-archbishop resident in the city; and as the professor of theology has certified at the request of this same prince-bishop to his strict orthodoxy, the city authorities thought to persuade him to receive the honorable and lucrative position of town-astrologer, not heeding the assertion of the monks that he was a wizard, and that his black spaniel was in reality none other than the devil himself.

A magician never suffers himself to be interrupted in his labors, whether engaged in contemplating the nature of spirits, in watching the heavens, or in the elaboration of the quinta essentia, the final essence, with his crucibles. Oh! what world-wide hopes, what solemn emotions, what inexpressible tension of soul must accompany these investigations! Gold, which rules the world, here falls from the tree of knowledge as a fruit over-ripe into the bosom of the master. And what is gold with all the power it possesses, and all the enjoyment it commands, compared with the ability to control heaven and earth and the spirits of hell, compared with the capacity to summon by the means of lustrations, seals, characters and exorcisms the angels hovering in the higher spheres, or tame to obedience the demons which fill the immensity of space? And what again is this power compared with the pure celestial knowledge to which magic delivers the key? a knowledge as much transcending the wisdom of angels as the son's place in his father's house is superior to a servant's! Perchance the magician at this very moment is deeply absorbed in some investigation, and within a hair's breadth of the revelation of some new and dazzling truth. Let us consider before we venture to ask admittance. Let us pause a moment before this iron-bound door, and recover our breath.

Ye men of science in this nineteenth century, how miserable you would be had you not once for all determined to limit your hopes to a minimum! To die when you have gleaned and contributed but a single straw to the harvest of science, is the fate to which you subject yourselves. The one among you who has brought to notice a hitherto unknown snail or flower, deems himself not to have lived in vain. To have discovered a formula under which a group of phenomena can be arranged, is already a triumph. This resignation which makes each one among you, even the greatest, only an insignificant detail-worker upon the immense labor whose completion you contemplate at an infinite remove, and the very outlines of which you ignore,--this resignation is sublime, though supremely painful to the aspiring soul. The individual laborer for his part abstains from all hope of seeing the whole truth, and works for his generation and futurity. Even the philosopher who undertakes to explain the framework of the macrocosm, does not see in his system a final solution of the "problem of cosmical explanation," but only a link in the long chain of development. He foresees the fall of his theories, satisfied, perhaps, if the traces of his error keep his successor on a straighter path. It is the race and not the individual which works in your work; which continues it when you have grown weary and been forgotten. It is a collective activity like that of ants and bees. But the magician stands alone! To be sure he receives what the past may offer,--but only to enclose himself with this treasure, and improve it by the immense wealth of his own mind. He believes in this immensity. He believes that the powers of all the generations are stored up in the bosom of the individual, and he hopes to accomplish alone what you faint-heartedly leave to the multitude of incalculable centuries!

* * * * *

We knocked upon the door ponderous with its bolts of iron. It opened as by an unseen hand. No servant interposed either welcome or remonstrance as we mounted the dark spiral stairs. Unannounced we entered the hall of the great magician. Along the arched ceiling of the rooms whose green lead-fastened window panes admitted but a scanty light, floated a fragrant vapor from the cell in the extreme background, where we could see the magician himself clad in a snow-white mantle reaching to his feet, and standing solemnly beside an incense-altar. Upon his head he wore a diadem on which was engraved the unspeakable name, Tetragrammaton, and in his hand he held a metallic plate which, as we soon learned, was made of electrum and signed with the signatures of coming centuries.

We paused and stammered a word of excuse for the interruption we had caused him. A smile of satisfaction broke upon his face when he had momentarily surveyed us, and he bade us welcome.

"You are the very persons whose arrival I have been expecting, and whom it has cost me much trouble to summon," he said. "You are the spirits of the nineteenth century, conjured to appear before a man of the fifteenth. You are called from the ante-chambers where the souls of the unborn await their entrance upon earth. But the images of the century to which your future mortal life belongs dwell in the depths of your consciousness. These images you shall show me. It is for this that I have summoned you, for I wish to cast a glance into the future."

I was seized with a strange, almost horrid feeling. I now remembered that I and my companions had transported ourselves, by the use of means which stirs up the entire reproductive forces of the imagination, from the actual nineteenth century, back to the long-past fifteenth, that we might see it live before our eyes, not in dissevered traits as a past age is wont to be preserved in books, but in the completeness of its own multi-formity. Who was right, the magician or myself? Which was the one only seemingly living, he or I? At what hour did the hand on the clock of time point at that moment? Granted that time is absolutely nothing but a conceptual form without independent reality; as long as I live in time I believe in its ordered course, and do not wish to see its golden thread entangled. I did not wish that the spirit which I had summoned should be my master and degrade me to a product of his own imagination. I summoned courage and exclaimed:--

"We have wandered through many cities, great magician, to find you. We finally stand in this your sanctuary. We see these gloomy Gothic arches over our heads; we see your venerable figure before us; we behold these folios and strange instruments which surround you; we look out through these windows and behold on one side towers and house-tops, on the other fields, meadows and the huts of serfs, and yonder in the distance the castle of a knight who is suspected of night-attacks upon the trains of the merchants as they approach the city. All these things stand real and present before our eyes: but, nevertheless, great magician, it is all, yourself included, a product of our magic, of the power of our own imagination, not of your magic. It is in order to make some acquaintance with the latter that we are come. It is not we who are to answer your questions, but you ours."

The magician smiled. He persisted in his view, and I in mine. The contested question could not be decided, and it was laid aside. But along with my consciousness of belonging to a period of critical activity, my doubts had awakened--my vivid hope a moment ago of finding in magic the key of all secrets, was fast fading away.